LinkedIn goes beyond personal profiles and status updates; it’s a great resource for networking, influence relationship building, and lead generation opportunities through paid programs.  Because users visit the site for purely work-related purposes, LinkedIn lends itself to making business connections.

Company Page
Building out your company page is the first step to optimizing LinkedIn for lead generation.  Your company page tells users who you are, what you do, and why they should follow you.  Follow these key best practices when building out your LinkedIn company page:

  • Optimize your company page for keywords—people frequently run searches on LinkedIn, so make sure you show up in results.
  • Add tabs to your company page— these are usually “Careers”, “Products”, and “Insights”. Your “Products” tab should be optimized for search.
  • Post on LinkedIn at least once daily to establish your presence.
  • Consider adding interesting videos and other media relative to your business to your product pages to further engage users.

LinkedIn Sponsored Updates
To get into the lead generation game, LinkedIn began offering Sponsored Updates, allowing companies to put paid promotions behind status updates.  These promoted updates are seen by your followers and targeted users outside of your follower network. Like all other social ads, LinkedIn updates should include a visual, and then link to a gated asset.

Sponsored Updates allow you to target users—you can choose to include or exclude users based on the following criteria:

  • Location
  • Company name
  • Job title
  • Skills
  • School name
  • LinkedIn Group associations
  • Gender
  • Age

LinkedIn Ads
LinkedIn ads give companies the chance to target their audience in powerful, unique ways. How?  The information found on a user’s LinkedIn profile is different than other social networks, and it’s particularly helpful for businesses.  This data maps well to the lead data you want from users—such as job title, company, industry, geographic location, and other demographic targeting.  LinkedIn allows you to customize your ads—you can opt for text-only ads, images, or video ads.  However, according to LinkedIn, adding an image to your ad can bring you 20% more clicks.   

For more information like this:  www.Marketo.com